This series is a primer for anarchists on how to be awesome. Check out the previous installments:
Key 1: Be a Work in Progress.
Key 2: Choose Your Own Curriculum in the School of Life
Key 3: Practice Radical Self-Honesty
Key 4: Back up Values with Virtues
Key 5: Do the Inner Work
This is the sixth and final segment in the How to Be Awesome series.
Key #6: Refine your particular brilliance and give it to the world.
The sixth key is probably the most important, if not the most fundamental, of being awesome.
Every person has a range of innate talents, inclinations, and aptitudes. Ideally, in the process of growing and learning throughout a person’s lifetime, these talents, inclinations, and aptitudes are refined into skills, passions, and expertise.
Refining your particular brilliance(s)—or honing and expressing your individuality—is a big part of what we’re all here on this planet to do. You can’t truly have fulfillment without attending to this aspect of life. So practice them. Invest in them. Perfect them.
And then you must give them to the world.
Because what even is the point of attaining ever greater awesomeness if you’re not going to share it?
Finding your brilliance
It may seem like the famous and notable among us have won the brilliance lottery. But Jimi Hendrix was no more brilliant in his way than old Mr. Jones down the road is in his. Maybe your particular brilliance is something that will put you in the limelight, like a great musical talent or a gift for public speaking. But statistically speaking, it’s more likely that your genius is something that is best practiced quietly and without fanfare. Whether your brilliance is shredding the guitar, teaching math, or growing the best carrots, you must give it out.
Sometimes, a particular brilliance is something you can do that no one else can. That doesn’t mean that someone else can’t competently perform the same task. Others might possess the same category of gifts or talents, and they may even have attained a higher level of skill than you have, but they can’t express these gifts in exactly the same way that you do, with the same style, for the same purpose, with the same impact. Ray Bradbury and Peter S. Beagle were both amazingly talented novelists, but Bradbury could never have written The Last Unicorn and Beagle could never have written Fahrenheit 451.
Sometimes it’s a matter of applying your brilliance where it’s needed when no one else notices or is willing to fill the need, like Joshua Coombes, a hairstylist who travels around giving free haircuts to homeless people. Or like an acquaintance of mine who combined her technical expertise and her experience as a caregiver to the elderly to start a business teaching seniors how to use computers and smart phones.
Brilliance Refinery
Developing your particular brilliance requires investment. Mostly you’ll be investing time. Time to learn, time to immerse, time to practice. You will probably also invest money, but time—and lots of it—is the most important investment you can make. You can buy all the best gear for your podcast recording studio, but you’ve accomplished precisely nothing if you never put in the work of actually recording podcasts.
Consistency is key. Set aside time regularly to the development of your brilliance. If you can set aside a good two or three-hour chunk, that’s great, but if your schedule won’t permit it, just do what you can and do it consistently.
Twenty minutes a day, over the course of a year, adds up to over 120 hours. In terms of total hours, that’s better than spending two hours one day a week on your craft. But twenty minutes every day gives you a better compounding advantage. If you only practice one day a week, you’re going to lose a lot of muscle on the six off days. Practicing every day builds strength and momentum.
In the beginning, you will fuck up. A lot. Even if you were born with the aptitude, the skill must be developed through trial and error. Your first podcast will suck. Your first novel will fill your trash can with crumpled up first pages. But it’s okay. It’s all part of the refining process. Each error is a badge of accomplishment, if you learn from it.
Slowly but surely, you begin to excel. And even once you’ve achieved a level of proficiency, you will still fuck up from time to time. But now your mistakes are grander, more exciting, and more interesting to fix.
Hopefully, if your particular brilliance is brain surgery, you’ll have had enough practice on cadavers to avoid making rookie mistakes in the operating room. But for most people, a practiced but imperfect iteration of the gift is already good enough to share. Feedback from sharing it bolsters your confidence and helps you with further refinement.
Finally, the self development hack that no one ever talks about, but that is foundational to brilliance of any kind: you must make it your own.
Only you have your exact combination of knowledge, experience, talents, skills, and interests, and that’s what gives you the ability to do a thing in a way that no one else has ever done it before. Bradbury’s precise amalgamation gave us Fahrenheit 451, Beagle’s gave us The Last Unicorn, and yours will give us something remarkable that only could have come out of you. There’s nothing new under the sun but there are always novel tweaks, fresh perspectives, unique modes of expression, unexplored links between known concepts.
Sharing is providing value and impact
My favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, was no starving artist. He did not fool himself into thinking that his verse could pay the bills. Few people buy poetry. Instead, on the advice of his father, he established himself in a sensible career as an attorney for an insurance firm. But he did not let his humdrum job rob him of the satisfaction of practicing his true craft, or deprive the world of his important work. One of the 20th century’s most prolific American poets, he wrote and published many volumes.
Of course, Stevens received some pay and royalties for his literary contributions, but, as I said, few people buy poetry. It would never be enough to support a family. Still, his poetry had and continues to have much greater impact on the world than his law career could ever have hoped to accomplish.
When I say “you must give it to the world”, understand that I mean making your gifts available for others to experience, benefit from, and appreciate. It’s turning your gift into value or positive impact for others. Not necessarily in a charitable way—many types of brilliance are marketable and deserve monetary compensation. Others, like being an amazing home chef or a supremely supportive friend—pay dividends in the form of fulfillment while you do something else to pay the bills. So sell it, trade it, share it, donate it, but please put it out there.
So that’s it. The sixth of six keys to being awesome.
I wrote this series to encourage my fellow “extremists” to take a closer, deeper look at our complaints about the state of civilization. Our observations may be correct, but our habitual feeling that the problem is one hundred percent external, that there’s nothing we can personally do to turn things around, is blatantly false.
There is something we can do. We can be more awesome.
Beyond the obvious personal benefits of greater health, happiness, prosperity, and fulfillment, the real purpose of being awesome is to spread awesomeness into your environment, where it will reverberate off everything it touches and return to you, fueling your pursuit of awesomeness in an ever-compounding cycle.
If you’d like to join a group of extremists doing just that, click the button below.
Thanks for doing what you do, we all need this sort of encouragement!